Gogol was no ordinary kid. He was born on the day that the instruments of an atmospheric observatory on a Hawaaiian mountaintop, which measures how much carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere – crossed a dangerous limit. But that was not why Gogol was marked different right from the time he was a young boy, lugging along his bags to the boarding school at the edge of an old forest, a few miles from the sprawling city of Anantanagar. There were other reasons that made him different.
But we have to begin at the beginning. Because if we do not, then all that happened later will sound like a fairy tale told by a storyteller with a fevered mind. One whose thoughts change colours like the chameleons that flitted across the neem tree branches in the village graveyard just behind Gogol’s hostel rooms.
Now it so happened that some years ago, a gang of thieves had emerged from the forest and knocked off some bricks from the boundary wall, which had created a hole through which the graveyard could be reached. And every night, when the moonlight would be painting the devil trees silver and the barn owls would be screeching away on the tombstones, Gogol would be standing by the wall, right next to the hole. Through this hole, thin, bony hands with outstretched palms, ten and twenty feet long, would be sticking out into the darkness.
“Here, Chingu, these two are yours,” he would whisper softly and drop two stolen mangoes into Chingu’s chalky-white palm. Chingu was the tallest of those who lived in the graveyard. People from the nearby village who came across him in the middle of the night said he was as tall as a bamboo grove and as thin as a beanstalk, but the moonlight shone through him and he cast no shadow.
“Now, where is Suleiman?” Gogol wanted to know. The mango trees on this side of the wall and the neem trees on the other side swayed and murmured, passing on the message. But Suleiman, who was just a wisp of smoke, and whose appearance would always be announced by a powerful gust of wind that rattled the stones of the old graveyard, wasn’t going to appear right then. He was always late.
“Lazy idiot, that Suleiman,” Gogol would say, the leaves whistling in agreement.
“Where are the others?” Gogol asked Chingu that night, dropping more mangoes from his schoolbag into his outstretched hands. But his bag was still heavy. Neither Chacha (who could sing like a bird and had a penchant for fish) nor Maryam (who brought with her the fragrance of a thousand roses) had arrived.
“I think they don’t live here anymore,” a voice whispered in his ears in the darkness.
“Who said that?” Gogol asked, but there was no answer from the other side.
And so, Gogol went back to his room, his bag still half full of stolen mangoes, and fell asleep on his small bed.
Next night, when the owls had begun to hoot and the fireflies were dancing among the ixora shrubs, Chingu’s hand poked through the hole and Gogol gave him two fresh mangoes. But neither Suleiman nor any of the others were there.
Gogol fished out a green mango from his bag and absentmindedly took a bite, “What is the matter, Chingu? Where have they all gone?” he asked.
“We are leaving, Gogol, we can’t live here anymore,” Chingu whispered in his ears. The trees seemed to hear him and they whispered along with Chingu. We are leaving, we are leaving, they said. The owls stopped their hooting and looked from one side to the other, rolling their fiery red eyes.
“But why so?” Gogol asked, his voice a little shaky with sadness. “Because they will be building bungalows here for people from the city,” Chingu said from the other side of the wall.
People from the city, people from the city, the trees joined in a chorus.
Hooooot, hoooot, the owls warned.
“The city is growing, the city is getting bigger and bigger,” Chingu whispered from behind the wall.
So his friends would be gone soon. Gogol looked up at the tall trees of the forest beyond the graveyard, silvery waterfalls of moonlight washing over their canopies. He put his arm around the trunk of a mango tree. A lump was forming in his throat.
A leaf floated down from a high branch and landed on his head. He took it in his hand and smelled it deeply. Tears were gathering at the corners of his eyes. He felt choked up with emotion.
Gogol put the leaf carefully in his pocket, zipped up his bag, and without wishing them goodnight, turned around and plodded his way back to his hostel room.
The boarding school had a science teacher who everyone feared. He was thickset and short, his nose was hooked like an eagle’s beak and his eyes were shifty like those of a jackal. He had a habit of roaming around the campus at night with an enormous flashlight, the kind you see in the hands of police constables and railway guards.
The teacher was ill-tempered and was notorious for meting out harsh punishments for the flimsiest of offences. Once, when Gogol’s classmate Paul had forgotten to tie his shoelaces, he made the poor boy memorise Tagore’s long poem “Juta Abiskar” (The Invention of Shoes) and recite it every day at the dining hall till he got it right without any mistakes. Another time, when a senior student was found disrupting class, his meals were randomly rationed; on certain days, the standard piece of fish would be missing from his plate at lunch, or there would be no meat and only a lonesome potato sitting in his weekend meat bowl. Because this teacher taught biology, the students called him Microscope.
So at the end of that week, when everyone had gone to sleep and the hostel warden was snoring away in his air-conditioned quarters, Gogol sneaked out of his room and crept up to the hole in the wall. It was a warm night punctuated by the rhythmic call of cicadas in the bushes. Somewhere, a frog began to croak.
Chingu was already there, waiting for his mangoes.
Just as Gogol unzipped his bag, a powerful beam of light lit up the darkness, blinding him for a moment.
Gogol froze.
It was Microscope, and Gogol was caught in the fiery beam of his flashlight!
“What are you doing here, you young whippersnapper?” the biology teacher barked in his raspy voice.
“Uh, Sir, I was, I was…” Gogol began to fumble.
Microscope came menacingly close to Gogol and swung his hand to direct the beam of light onto the wall but froze suddenly, his raised hand stuck in midair. Right at that moment, the flashlight flew out of his grip and sailed slowly through the air, landing on top of the wall, from where its blazing beam hit Microscope’s eyes like a searchlight, blinding him completely.
Excerpted with permission from ‘The Seventh Sense’ in Wonder Tales for a Warming Planet, Rajat Chaudhuri, illustrated by Isha Nagar, Perky Parrot/Niyogi Books.
